Friday, January 02, 2009

This a post script to a post I wrote the other day on Israel's use of Social Media to help win the war on information front . . . I mentioned several interesting places to visit for information on the current operations in Gaza (of note Leora has several others on her blog as well).

At the time I decided, rather flippantly, that while follow @Qassamcount, I would have all updates forwarded to my my cell-phone. That evening while learning a text or two came in about rockets landing in Ashkelon, the Negev and othr places . . . it made of a quick break from learning. Nu. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But at 5:00 in the morning I was woken by a buzzing cell-phone. Half asleep I picked it up to see several rockets had landed in various Israeli cities. I rolled over and went back to sleep. 5:10 came another text - two more rockets had come down. 5:30 another Qassam came down somewhere near Beer Sheva. 6:30, 7:30 . . . They kept coming down, breaking me from some confused dream about a virus destroying my computer (Hashem Yishmor) . . . While taking a shower my phone went again . . . Drinking my Coffee, Davening learning, eating Lunch . . . While writing this post at the Un-G-dly hour of 4:43 in the morning, a text just came in that another 7 rockets had recently come down.

Something interesting is happening - my life is being interrupted by events abroad.

News can be a form of escapism. We read it to take a break from our daily humdrum, then we return to the grind. It's there when we want it, quiet when we don't. We can go about our lives - perhaps mentioning it as a point of interest to a friend - only returning to it when we want to.

Now, however, I'm being chased. My day is interrupted, at relatively inconvenient times to boot. I don't have the audacity to say that the annoying buzz and bells of my phone can compare to the utter terror and damage of a Qassam - but something is (at least on a figurative level) hitting home. d

When we check the news at the end of the day, it's not that 50 rockets came down, and then it was over . . . it's a constant rain of fire - coming and going at whim, not caring for the schedule of our lives.Let us pray that it ends soon.

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comments:

During the horrible Mumbai terrorist attack I wrote a post called Modulate... one can only take in so much. So you take in some news, then you read Tehillim. Or you go for a walk. Or get ready for Shabbat. Or write poetry. Then you take in some more news. This works almost anywhere, even in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. In Sderot, I'm afraid, or Ashdod or Ashkelon or Beersheva, it's all over.

I was feeling anxious about checking Twitter yesterday, because it's all about Israel now. Even a web designer in Vermont, someone totally not Jewish, tweeted that her client's site got hacked because of Gaza.

I was thinking today about someone's tweet that it's strange to see the war tweets mixed in with the normal life tweets. The thing is, war is like that.

For everyone who isn't a combatant, war is something that gets in the way of you trying to live a normal life. You need to feed your family, keep a roof over your house, work, play, sleep, and all the rest. On good days, a war interrupts this in an annoying way. On bad days it interrupts your ability to live a normal life such that you will have to change what normal is. On really bad days, war makes it so that there will never be a normal life for you again. Over the course of any given war, all of those things will happen in varying degrees and on varying days to everyone in the war zone.

-Leora: Twitter is the greatest blessing, and the greatest curse for news fiends. It gives us our 'hit' on the spot . . . but then we keep coming back for more. It overloads the senses and the mind. It is very important to take a break!-Tracy: A very important point. We are very much connected to everyone in Israel. Our actions - our mitzvos have a direct effect on what goes on over there. Let's do our part!-Farbrengen: I hope so. From your mouth to G-d's ears.-Muse: The most important thing to remember is that the Terrorists win by disrupting out lives - even if the missile is thousands of miles away. We must take a break from the news, only if in order to beat them.-Lisha: Interesting observation . . .